The Chinese court recently ordered Apple to pay 1.03 million yuan, or roughly $165,000 to a group of writers who claimed their work was pirated and sold through the App Store. A judge from Beijing’s Second Intermediate People’s Court found Apple to be liable for the sale of unlicensed works by a total of eight local writers, which ended up repurposed as apps and distributed through the App Store according to The Wall Street journal. The fine is said to be distributed out to the group of writers by the two companies involved in the case.

This decision is far from the requested compensatory damages that the China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) sought out, which was 23 million yuan ($3.65 million). In response to the ruling, Apple employees said that they “take copyright infringement complaints very seriously” and that the company is “always updating our service to better assist content owners in protecting their rights.”

The statement Apple made was very different from previous assertions from CWWCS, which claimed that the Cupertino California company knew about the pirated versions since July 2011 and was slow to remove the offending apps from its online store. Apple supposedly told the group to contact the pirate app developers on their own but the claims were not verified. The outcome is the second Chinese copyright related loss for Apple in the past three months as well. One of the previous being the same Beijing court ruling that Apple must pay $82,600 for the sale of unauthorized digital copies of a popular Chinese language encyclopedia.